1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic apparatus for identifying a user in the event that the user who is not authorized to do so gains access to the apparatus and a medium having a program therefore recorded thereon, and in particular to an electronic apparatus for recording as an image the peripheral status of a system while the system is in operation and a medium having a program therefore recorded thereon.
2. Description of the Related Art
A protection mechanism against illegal usage is provided on a conventional electronic apparatus such as a personal computer system (hereinafter, referred to as PC system). This protection mechanism is provided on the premise that the system knows who is the user and identifies him or her as an authorized user when he or she logs on the system. The identification of the user is normally carried out by identifying a certain knowledge that the user possesses, a certain thing that the user possesses or a certain personal feature of the user himself or herself.
Entering his or her password is used as the most common means. Moreover, there is a case where a signature pattern is used for identification of the user. In addition, identification methods using the recognition of finger prints, palm prints, hand configurations, retina patterns, voices or the like have been developed as means for identifying the user on a terminal.
As is described above, there have been devised various methods for protecting a PC system against an illegal usage by a user who is originally not authorized to gain access to the system. However, in a case where a password is entered, it has been possible to record passwords illegally used but has been difficult to identify the user.
In order to identify an illegal user, visual information on the external appearance of the user is very useful. As is seen from automated teller machines, a monitor camera is installed in the vicinity of an automated teller machine as a security system for monitoring the machine. However, since this security system has to be installed separately from the machine, a certain cost is involved. Moreover, although visual information can be recorded for monitoring, with such a system, recording is carried out at all times, and therefore, a recording medium of a large capacity is needed.
Due to this, there is caused a problem when such a security system is adopted for the PC system. In particular, with a battery-operated PC system, the operation time of the system is reduced because the battery has to be used as a power source for operating the recording system at all times for recording visual information continuously. Therefore, it is required that the peripheral status of the PC system in operation is easily recorded as image information.
To this end, an object of the present invention is to enable the identification of an illegal user of a PC system while reducing the consumption of the resource for the system. Another object of the present invention is to enable verification using the PC system without using an application program. A further object of the present invention is to enable the setting of image information recording not only from a BIOS setup program but also from an operating system or an application program.